I feel that I am now fully assimilated into Angeleno culture after making many, many trips on L.A.'s great yet sorely underused bus system today. Over the course of almost twelve hours, I got on and off buses in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Brentwood and Santa Monica today. A couple were packed. One was empty save for me for a while. I met some very friendly people and got to take in lots of the cityscape. For example, I am now extremely familiar with the corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Veteran Avenue that I sat at for about fifteen minutes or more today, watching the traffic crawl towards the 405 freeway entrance. As many times as I've sat on the DVP in rush hour, I can honestly say I've never seen traffic move that slowly before.
The insanely bizarre thing about L.A. is, its residents think traffic like that is completely normal. They willingly sit through it every single day. I watched car after car creep by carrying only one person, a driver chatting animatedly on his/her cell phone and dealing pleasantly enough with the worst gridlock I've ever witnessed. C-r-a-z-y. I talked to a few Angelenos about their transportation situation today. One man had had his car totalled six months ago, decided to try out the bus for a change, and is happy with the switch. He says the subway's great too--I'm going to try that out on the weekend. Another couple of guys I talked to said they couldn't imagine taking the bus at all--they wouldn't even know which bus to take to get from where they lived to work each day. They thought I was properly nuts for even trying.
This seems to be the normal response from city natives when I tell them about my bus travels. I was told I was crazy for trying to take the bus from Westwood to Hollywood, but that worked out just fine today. Granted, I missed the stop where I had to transfer and ended up arriving at my destination about half an hour later than I'd planned, but fortunately, I'd left early. That's the thing about getting around in L.A.--if you have time to spare and can adopt a sort of Zen-like attitude towards the sometimes Herculean effort it takes to get from point A to point B, it's not so bad.
While L.A. makes me appreciate cabs, the TTC (yes, even the Queen streetcar at rush hour), and the possibility of walking anywhere, I can't say it hasn't started to grow on me in its own crazy way. No matter how frustrating the situation on the ground is, you can always look up and see a sunny, bright blue sky above, a palm tree or two, and sometimes, as was the case for me this morning, HOLLYWOOD beckoning to you in the distance. And that's pretty damn cool, if you ask me.
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3 comments:
have you found an equivalent to the #4 in madison?
by the way...if you cross paths with kiera, tell her about me.
Hey Shaw-ty - why not just shake your moneymaker for a ride?
she take my money!
I would say that Hollywood is more or less the #4 bus personified (I don't think that's the right term here, but that's OK) in a neighborhood. But much more fun, because it is frequently peppered with famous people, which, sadly, the #4 bus is not.
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